Google Cloud Platform

Overview

This Collection Agent plugin monitors Google Services through the Google Cloud Platform metrics.

Metrics gathered depend on the services specified in the plugin configuration.

You can use the following collector in the Collection Agent YAML file:

Prerequisites

Geneos environment

The GCP Collection Agent plugin requires the following versions of Geneos components:

The GCP binaries are packaged with Netprobe, and are stored in the collection_agent folder. Alternatively, you can download separate binaries for the GCP plugin from ITRS Downloads.

GCP environment

The GCP plugin requires valid Google credentials to use.

Google application default credentials searches for credentials in the following locations:

  1. Google Application Credentials environment variable
  2. User credentials set up by using the Google Cloud CLI
  3. The attached service account, returned by the metadata server

The order of the locations ADC checks for credentials is not related to the relative merit of each location.

Google Application Credentials environment variable

You can use the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable to provide the location of a credential JSON file. This JSON file can be one of the following types of files:

User credentials provided by using the gcloud CLI

You can provide user credentials to ADC by running the gcloud auth application-default login command. This command places a JSON file containing the credentials you provide (usually from your own Google Account) in a well-known location on your file system. The location depends on your operating system:

The credentials you provide to ADC by using the gcloud CLI are distinct from your gcloud credentials—the credentials the gcloud CLI uses to authenticate to Google Cloud.

The attached service account

Many Google Cloud services let you attach a service account that can be used to provide credentials for accessing Google Cloud APIs. If ADC does not find credentials it can use in either the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable or the well-known location for Google Account credentials, it uses the metadata server to get credentials for the service where the code is running.

Using the credentials from the attached service account is the preferred method for finding credentials in a production environment on Google Cloud. To use the attached service account, follow these steps:

  1. Create a user-managed service account.
  2. Grant that service account the least privileged IAM roles possible.
  3. Attach the service account to the resource where your code is running.

Please refer to Google Application Default Credentials for more information.

Required Google Cloud Permissions

For all services, the following monitoring permissions are needed to gather metrics from Cloud Monitoring:

Some services require additional permissions to get resource information (e.g. user labels):

Configure Geneos to deploy the GCP plugin

The GCP plugin supports Collection Agent publication into Geneos using dynamic Managed Entities. Setting up this plugin in Geneos involves these primary steps:

  1. Set up your Collection Agent plugin.

  2. Configure your mappings.

  3. Configure your other Dynamic Entities in the Gateway, see Create Dynamic Entities in Collection Agent setup for a more detailed procedure.

Set up your Collection Agent plugin

Set up your collector in the Gateway Setup Editor by adding the following configuration in Dynamic Entities > Collectors. For more information, see Collectors in Dynamic Entities.

Below are the available collectors for the GCP plugin:

Collectors Description
GoogleCloudMonitoringCollector Enables the GCP collector. By default, all supported services are monitored. If you want to monitor specific services, use the enabled-services: option

Configure your GCP plugin using the following reference configuration:

collectors:
  # GCP collector configuration
  - name: gcp
    type: plugin
    class-name: GoogleCloudMonitoringCollector

    # Interval (in millis) between collections (optional, defaults to five minutes).
    collection-interval: 300000

    # Project id to monitor (required)
    project-id: itrsdev

    # Google cloud service metrics to be gathered (optional, default to all supported services)
    #enabled-services:
    #  - compute

    # Plugin self monitoring (optional, disabled by default)
    #self-monitoring:
    # Collection interval of the self-monitoring metrics (required if self-monitoring is used)
    #  interval: 300000
    # Enable detailed self-monitoring metrics reporting (optional, false by default) 
    # Two levels of monitoring are :
    #  - Detailed (true): API Call counts are reported per monitored service, per resource, per specific api
    #  - Detailed (false): API Call counts are reported total per moonitored service
    #  detailed-mode: false

    # Google cloud service launch stage configuration (optional, default is GA)
    #enabled-stages:
    #  - ALPHA

The plugin contains an optional self-monitoring-interval configuration to enable or disable self monitoring, which counts the number of Google APIs called. This feature is disabled by default and can be enabled by setting the interval value in seconds.

You can also set the interval value to determine how often metrics are published.

By default, a summary view where only the total calls per service are published by the plugin. If detailed-mode is true, the plugin publishes a summary view with more detailed metrics by breaking down the API calls per service, per resource, and per API called.

Optional enabled-stages configuration to include specific metric launch stages is also available.

Configure your mappings

Use one of the following options listed below to configure your dynamic mappings.

Example Gateway-SQL Summary view

The template also includes a Gateway-SQL sampler named GCP that shows a summary view of your GCP project.

This view provides information on all the instances, disks, and networks under the monitored project.

["Geneos"] ["User Guide"]

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